"Jesus in Toronto"
Engaging the city in Christ's name
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Text: Acts 2:1-11
Last week, I attended a conference celebrating worship in the United Church of Canada. It was the 80th anniversary of our denomination, and ministers and laypeople from all over the country gathered to focus attention on the worship of God, and its importance in our lives and in our churches. It was a time for me also to meet old friends: people who have scattered into ministries from coast to coast, many of whom were classmates or colleagues of mine. It was like a reunion; like returning home to be with your friends. One old friend took me to one side to enquire about the nature of my ministry here, in Toronto. He asked: “How is life in the big, bad city?” Then, he raised his eyebrows in sarcasm and declared, “Toronto the good, eh?”
Given his inquiring mind and piercing look, I realized that this was a man who was going to extol all the virtues of the place he was ministering, a rural setting in the Maritimes, and indeed, he began to wax eloquently about all the advantages of rural living.
He talked about how he could go down to the bank in the morning and have a discussion with all the members of his congregation who were lining up. What a joy it was to go to the post office and actually be handed your mail personally by the clerk, who greeted you with a loving smile and a “Good morning, Reverend!” He talked about how lovely it was to go to the local ball games, and realize he had baptized every single child playing on the field. He went on and on, and on, about the beauties of rural ministry. Then he asked, “And how are things in the big, bad city?”
However, as often happens when one speaks in such romantic terms, one needed only scratch the surface to realize that all was not the Utopia that he was extolling. In fact, the bank where he had been lining up and meeting the members of his congregation was actually closing and moving to a bigger town. The mail that he had enjoyed receiving by hand was now being put in a box at the end of his street. The players on the ball team were no longer members of his denomination, but another one, so he couldn't brag about their careers. No, not everything was quite as wonderful as he might have made it seem to be.
The “simple life,” as he seemed to categorize his ministry, is just not quite as simple as all that - one need only ask Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to have that confirmed! No, in fact, the simple life is not always as simple as people make it out to be. At times, however, we do love to think that the world somewhere else is better than it is around us. During the 19th century, for example, the poets used to wax eloquently about the beauty of nature during the rise of the Industrial Revolution. They wrote all this poetry, bemoaning what human beings were doing and extolling the virtues of the virginal world around them. Gerard Manley Hopkins did it in the following way:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men, then, wreck his rod?
Generations have trod, and trod and trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
Now, during the Industrial Revolution, the artists' opinion was that humanity was simply just trampling on everything, killing what was beautiful, and they had a romantic vision of God and God's earth, and the beautiful, Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth.
Is the city as bad as people make it out to be? Are we not really just a mix of good and bad, just as much the combined presence of all that is glorious and all that is inglorious in the human world? Do the rich and the poor not live side by side? Do not those whose ancestors were immigrants 100 to 200 years ago rub shoulders with immigrants who have been here for 15 months? Don't the devout sit side-by-side with the profane on the subway? Do not people of all colours and stripes and languages talk to one another in the restaurants and the coffee shops? Are there not within the city verdant, green and beautiful tree-lined streets, as well as the smog and the industry and the dirt that surrounds us? The city is neither the bad, old city that my friend thinks it is, nor is it Toronto the good, shining like a beacon of light amongst all other cities in the world. We are just like everywhere else. The city is the place where human beings gather and live together.
All this raises the question that I want to pose this morning: What is Jesus doing in Toronto? Is this city in which we live, and move, and have our being a precious place for God? Is Jesus engaging it in a meaningful and a powerful way? Is the city a place where Jesus resides? Now, I ask this question, and I will borrow my answer from the Book of Acts, for today's passage describes a seminal moment in the history of the life of the Christian church. It was the day of Pentecost.
Now, I think it is fitting that while we in the western tradition have already had our Pentecost, this Sunday is Pentecost Sunday for those in the eastern rite. This is the day that the eastern church celebrates the coming of the Spirit. So why do we not, then, celebrate Pentecost with the brothers and sisters of the eastern rite? I think we should. Pentecost was the gathering of the Christian community as it first began. It was made up, and Luke tells us in Acts that this was the celebration of the Passover, and Jews from all over the world and proselytes who were new to the faith came and celebrated the Passover feast in Jerusalem. A multi-ethnic scene was created on the streets of that city, as people poured in from all over the world.
It was a gathering place, but it was also, for Christians, a bad place. It was a city where Jesus had been crucified 50 days before. It was the place where Christians were being persecuted, and were making themselves recluses in an upper room. Jerusalem wasn't a good city: If anything, it was the most dark and bleak of cities at that time. Yet, in that very spot on that very day, the Holy Spirit came upon the Christian community with power. At that very moment, just like at the beginning of Jesus' ministry when he was baptized, so, too, the baptism of the Holy Spirit came upon the believers in Jerusalem. In that city, friends formed the first Christian community and began to spread the message of the Word that it would bring once and for all.
I think it is fitting that Jesus Christ, a man who had his ministry primarily in rural communities, who used mainly stories of the farm and the fields and the water, ultimately came to be proclaimed in a city, in an urban place, in the darkest place: That is where the promise of the Holy Spirit was poured out amongst his people.
As we gather here today, in the City of Toronto, it seems to me that the event of Pentecost is a powerful statement about what the Christian community ought to be, for the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was universal in its scope, and the city was the sign of it. Whether we like it or not, and despite those who like to look back on rural ways as simpler and kinder times, Statistics Canada tells us that Canada is becoming increasingly an urban country.
Migration into the cities is far exceeding any other movement of people. When immigrants come to this land they tend to settle within their communities in cities, Toronto most of all. Therefore, if we simply want to ignore Christ in the city, we do so at our peril. If we simply want a nicer day, when we don't have to deal with the complexities of the city, then we deny the universality of the mission of Jesus in the city, for Jesus has come with a universal message, and the city is the place where it must be delivered.
For example, look at all the names of the places where people had come from in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago: Crete, Egypt, Cappadocia, Phrygia and Pamphylia. They had come from every part of the known world: from Africa to the middle of Europe to the very east from Damascus, all the way over to the Atlantic Ocean on the edge of the Mediterranean. These first Christians had come from every place; these Jews had come from every place.
When I look at the wonder of this city, when I look at Toronto, I don't see the likes of it anywhere else on earth. Oh, I know that globalization has brought people into the cities all over the world, and that every city in a sense is multi-ethnic. No city is homogenous any more - they can't survive that way! But of all the cities in the world, Toronto is perhaps the most diverse. It is where the world has come to find a home. If Toronto is this place where the world has come to find a home, then surely it seems to me that the ministry of Christ's spirit in this city is a vital statement of the role of the Christian community in the world. What we do and say here in Toronto in a multi-faith, mixed community, with many different faces and colours, says and speaks volumes to the rest of the world.
Oh, the rest of the world is not looking at us at every moment; we are not the centre of attention by any means. But what we do, and how Christians engage each other and the world is a statement: A statement of how we live. It is a powerful statement, but it is not unique. Let us not think of our city as the only place that is multi-ethnic, the only place where there is pluralism. There was pluralism in the New Testament aplenty! You could not turn around in any of the great cities and not find people from Africa or from Asia Minor or from Europe. That was the nature of the biblical world. Yet, in the midst of that biblical world, Christ sent his Spirit to speak to his people.
I believe the Spirit still speaks to the people; it still engages the city; and it does so in a powerful and supernatural way. You can see the Spirit's power right from that day in Jerusalem, when all the people heard God speaking through Peter to them in their own languages. Now, some try to rationalize this, and suggest that in fact all they were hearing was Greek, or point out that many of those there had been brought up in the true Jewish tradition and would be familiar with Hebrew or Aramaic. But it was more than that, for Luke goes into great detail to tell us that the people were astonished by what they heard. Not only were they astonished by the message, but they also heard it in their own tongue, not in a universal language. In other words, God was speaking to the people, to their hearts and their ears, to their minds and their commitments, in a way that only the Spirit could.
I know that sometimes it is hard enough just to understand things in our own English language, let alone talking about God speaking to our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit. I read something lovely from a school teacher. It was one of these Internet things about how students who had been struggling with the English language had to write reports about the biblical era. For example, when defining David, they said he was a Hebrew king, “skilled in playing the liar;” he fought with the “Philatelists, a race of people who lived in biblical times.” They said that Solomon, one of David's sons, had “500 wives and 500 porcupines.” The one I loved the best, the most logical of all: Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name.
We sometimes struggle even with our own language, let alone coming to terms with a spiritual language. However, the point of the Book of Acts is a simple one: Whatever happened on that day and in that place, God spoke through the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit then has the ability to transcend culture, the ability to transcend philosophical categories.
One of the things that we are getting wrapped up with in the church these days, certainly in academic terms, is in trying to describe people in philosophical terms. Are they traditionalists. Or, do they fit into the categories of modernism, with its hyper-individualism, or post-modernism, with its sense of collectivity or mysticism, or with what is now known as “trans-modernism,” a modernism that is amorphous and continually changing? We struggle, and we try to think of what is the best way to speak to all these people, who belong to so many different philosophical categories. My friends, the answer to this quest is to concentrate on the Spirit! The church always does need to open itself, its heart and its mind and its soul, to the power of the Spirit, for it is the Spirit that speaks.
Remember a passage from a few weeks ago on Genesis? God created the world by the spoken Word. When Jesus became incarnate at the beginning of the Gospel of John, we say that the Word became flesh, and it is the Word of the Spirit that gives life. It is the Word of the Spirit that gives energy, it is the Word of the Spirit that transcends race and culture and language and, in Christ's name, speaks to and addresses the world.
I think one of the most difficult things to do is to go to a country that speaks a foreign language. It is so uncomfortable, because you know that really you are in their country, and it is incumbent on you to speak their language, and not the other way around. When I was in Chile back in February, which as you know, is primarily Spanish-speaking, I visited the archives that I have mentioned to you before at the Vicario de la Soledad, and a young woman greeted me at the door. I tried to tell her what I wanted to see in these archives, and she struggled to understand me - she had no English, I had no Spanish! I made a few gestures, and she figured out what those gestures were, and we started to climb the stairs.
She decided that rather than take me to a place that she wasn't sure I wanted to go, she would show me everything! Everything! Off she went, and gave me the Grand Tour - in Spanish! She showed me everything, pulled out every file, picked out every notice. I was overwhelmed! However, there were two things that stood out in that engagement. The first, that I understood her passion for what she was doing and what she was showing me. And the second, was her love for people. Somehow, the sheer force of her passion, her love for that work, and her people inspired me. I tried to understand; I tried to follow; I picked up a few words; I started to get the gist of what she was doing. Then, she opened one last file - a massive, massive file - and in it were photographs.
She couldn't explain to me who these people were, and all the captions under the photographs made no sense to me. Then, finally, in a lucid moment, the light went on in my head and in her and she said, “No! No!” They were dead! Not one of those was alive. These were the photographs of those who had gone missing in Chile. I just put my hands together as if to say, “All I can do is pray,” and she put her hands together, and she started to pray. Then, we ended the tour. She embraced me. I thanked her. I went home. We had communicated in a prayerful, and a deep, and a passionate way. Her love for the people who had been killed, her passion for their wellbeing, had touched my soul, and she knew it. The Spirit moves in mysterious ways! And the Spirit speaks!
In our multicultural and multi-ethnic city, that is often how Christ does speak: He speaks through passion; he speaks through prayer; he speaks his word of love. He also speaks to the root and the heart of humanity as a whole.
When the Apostle Paul was told to go to Damascus after he had experienced the power of Christ's spirit in an encounter with Jesus on the road, the words of the Spirit to Paul were: “Arise, and go into the city.” After his conversion, he had to go to the most difficult place. After all, he had been going to Damascus to kill Christians - now he was going as a Christian! The Apostle Paul was being led by the Spirit into a world that was dangerous and dark. Into the city the Spirit called him. Into the Spirit Paul went. From the city with that Spirit he emerged.
My friends, the city is often the place where human experience is at its most raw and most exaggerated. Maybe it is because there are so many human beings there; maybe it is because sin can be hidden and tucked under a bed and no one sees it; maybe it is because there are so many groups that it is hard to break through the shell of those groups. Regardless, the Spirit says to the believers, “Go into that city. Address it with the Word. Love it at its core. Bring my Word, and my love, and my forgiveness to it. Do so passionately.”
A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting a friend in Muskoka. At bedtime, I was looking for something to read and there, beside the bed, was a Life magazine containing many of the famous pictures of the 20th century. I saw again that memorable photograph of that lone student in Tiananmen Square, standing before that tank. It is a frightening picture of defiance, but what shines through is the student's love for his people and for the cause. Sometimes, I think the road that lies ahead of the Christian community is overwhelming. Just like that man, we need courage to go into the city, and courage to share the faith, and courage to lift up the weak, and it takes courage to forgive the unforgivable, and it take courage not to run away from the city, but to engage it in Christ's name.
George MacDonald put it so beautifully when he said, “You cannot run away; but you have to go to the city.” This is what he said:
I said, ”˜O Lord, let me walk in the fields'
He said, ”˜Nay, walk in the town'
I said, ”˜There are no flowers there
He said, ”˜No flowers, but a Crown.'I said, ”˜But the skies are black,
There is nothing but noise and din.'
And he wept as he sent me back,
”˜There is more' he said, ”˜there is sin.'I said, ”˜But the air is thick
And the fogs are veiling the Sun'
He answered, ”˜Yet souls are sick
Souls in the dark undone.'I said ”˜I shall miss the light
And friends will miss me they say.
He answered me, ”˜But choose tonight
If I am to miss you or they.'I pleaded for time to be given.
He said, ”˜It is hard to decide.
It will not seem hard in Heaven
To have followed the steps of your guide.I cast one look at the field
Then set my face to the town.
He said, ”˜My child do you yield?
Will you leave the flowers for the Crown?'Then into his hand went mine
And into his heart came me
And I walked in a light divine
The path I feared to see.
The call of Jesus in Toronto is a call to you and me! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.